[Spaceships] Million Merchant Marathon

[hal]

Originally Posted by scc

So I'm working on stuff for a setting that has Earth going through terraforming Venus, The Moon, and Mars. It's this terraforming bit that kind of interests me for the moment. To terraform the Moon I need to 2.4e15 tons of nitrogen from Venus to the Moon, moving about that much to Mars is probably also a good idea as well.

Now this number is big, so that means there will be a lot of freighters moving this nitrogen, even the absurd number I give of 1 million will require something like 3 million years of ships moving gas so it's probably actually low. Now given that Hohmann transfer orbits are a thing that means that the ideal conditions for a race.

Here may be a good thought to consider...

If a "mass" within the Sun's gravity well slows down - its orbital speed around say, Venus, will not be that OF Venus, but will work such that the ship will begin to "fall" towards the Sun.

If I recall correctly, solar sails can be used to slow a ship just as much as it can accelerate a ship. Which means, it will fall into the sun, and require that the pilot plot a course to insure that his speed is no lower than that of Mercury if he doesn't want to get any closer to the sun than Mercury. Yes, it likely helps if your course doesn't point you straight at the sun despite being at the speed of Mercury, but that's not something I will go into. ;)

From there, the thrust from the Solar Sails will intensify due to the inverse square of the distance law until the ship reaches the maximum velocity possible from the use of its solar sails. Not sure what that velocity will do where it comes to reaching the orbit of Mars or what have you...

In theory? Your solar sail ships may NOT need to utilize Hohmann transfer orbits. Sadly, I don't have the math background to determine if this is feasible or not. The real problem however, is - the closer you dive towards the sun, the hotter your vessel becomes. I'm not certain what the safest approach is to the sun - nor what the actual orbital times will be.

As for harvesting the Atmosphere of Venus - some time back, I read about a tether ssystem for which ships could aim for the tether that is at the end of a long cable connected to a satellite. Is there any reason you can't simply have Venus orbital stations with tethers that reach into the atmosphere, and suck atmosphere up? Yes, there will be drag involved, but if you're going to use a solar screen to hide Venus from the sun's full sunlight, I think you may have some options here. For example, what could you do with a bank of solar panels large enough to hide Venus from the Sun? Could those solar panels power some high powered lasers whose only goal is to accelerate the solar sails of ships moving away from the orbit of Venus?

What about microwaves being beamed into the atmosphere of Venus - where the skimmers dive into the atmosphere of Venus, use a portion of the atmosphere as reaction fuel powered by microwave powered ships (broadcast power) and have them bring up a fair amount of atmosphere back into orbit? Those skimmers would need a maintenance crew to keep them in top shape, and they likely require someone to operate them remotely (would YOU want to land on Venus due to a ship malfunction?!!) But here is where things can become even more interesting...

what if you used the energy from the solar shade, to power maglev launch systems? The problem will be - what will you launch, and where will you get the material for the containers that you're launching? If these "containers" are launched on a ballistic trajectory - they don't even really NEED a ship to get them to where they're going. They just need a ship to collect the containers that were launched.

Just brainstorming here. I haven't the foggiest notion on what materials are used for solar panels, and whether the amount necessary to create the solar shade will be present in significant amounts to be worth the while.